Sunday, September 7, 2014

My Morning Cup: Dark Green Needle Style!

Good Morning, reader!

First things first: Never underestimate the incredible power of a morning cup of tea! It truly brightens your day, awakens your taste buds with a sweet sonnet of simplicity, and in the ritual of the process of making it, tea becomes a medium to distract oneself from the chaos of the present and allows you to relax and calm down.

The number of times making tea has helped my subconscious work through something that seemed impossibly frustrating mere seconds ago and boiled (tea pun! ;)) down to a simple solution.

So, dear reader, please make a pot of tea and relish in the simple ritual and motion of tea-brewing!

This cup of tea is one of my personal favorites. Dark Green Needle (from my local tea shop that has AMAZING prices and STUNNING teas! Check them out here: TeaSource! They ship anywhere in the US! Just let them know Josh sent ya! ;) )

The tea itself is a GREAT price for the quantity of tea you get! You may think 2 ounces of this tea is a little smidge of tea, but let me tell you: this tea is some sort of magical Gallifreyan product and just keeps replicating itself in the bag. Seriously. I've made this tea numerous times and STILL haven't made a dent in this bag! So now to put an end to this marketing ad (LOL!)

Dark Green Needle is a beautiful, simple, thought-provoking pure green tea with a powerfully understated tone. As it is a pure green tea, there are no fruity bits to cover the raw, earthy potency of the tea itself. But therein lies the enchanting quality of the tea. It has a raw, earthy smell with a rich, nutty flavor that makes your heart warm with a relaxing ahhh. It's just a beauty of a tea and your tastebuds will thank you for the utterly complex simplicity of this cup. And because it is a green tea, you can re-brew it over and over and each time you do so, the tea changes in complexity and slowly unfurls its inner enigmatic flavor. It's a gorgeous tea and I find myself struggling to do it justice. A beautiful, mysterious green tea with a deceitful air of simplicity.

Now that we have the tea covered in glorious prose, I have something to say: Designing is a constant struggle between imagination and mental imagery versus reality and actuality. I find myself stuck at the final finish on this shawl I'm designing due to my doubts on whether or not I executed the shape correctly from pen, paper, and imagination or whether I have just failed miserably.

And the thing is, I can't exactly take it off the needles to view it - unless I feel like picking up the eleventy-billion stitches this shawl has! I'm not even sure how many stitches there are! I know it started with 3 and exploded into physical form with lightning speed comparable to an atomic bomb. So I'm stuck in quandary of do I move forward and use the motto, C'est la vie as my mantra or do I take arms against a sea of knitting and by ripping the needles from the shawl, end it? I really don't feel like doing the latter, as I've knit about 750 yards of yarn into this burgeoning bulwark of shawl, but I find myself stuck - worse than a semi-truck in a ice dam.

Also, while having this incredibly fruitless personal battle raging in my head, I have to decide what to actually do for the border/finishing bit. Do I do clean lines of garter stitch for about 10-14 rows, add in a signature slipped stitch pattern, spice it up with an icord bind off, do an applied edging, or ____? It's quite frustrating right now. I attempted the sage advice from a friend to sleep on it, but I find that neither the act of sleeping nor the act of trying not to think about it has granted me some form of inner epiphany or an act of divine inspiration.

Some would argue that I should move onto a different project for a bit or knit on something non-design related. And they have a valid point. But I am about 10 rows from finishing this sucker and I want it done. Not because I hate the project or anything of that nature, but merely because I wish to accomplish something in my knitting sphere of life. I've been trucking on this shawl for over a week just to get it close enough for completion and I'm not ready to let 10 rows of knitting hold me down.

So basically this post boils down to Josh VS. Shawl and the shawl is being an evil, sadistic beast of an opponent and I do not appreciate it! LOL!

This is the reason why I have taken to airing my personal knitting problem to the world. Maybe I can shame my shawl into submission or force my brain to make a move out of deadlock. We shall see...

So, dear reader, you come to the end of this whiney, designer-y rant about the impossibleness of working with a shawl design and also to the end of my cup of tea. (or rather pot!)

With this last sentence, I wish you all the best and may your knitting kneel in submission to your needles and willpower!

3 comments:

Kay in New Mexico
said...

My knitting isn't much for the kneeling and submission thing, but I do have a great tea to recommend if you haven't tried it. It's Iron Goddess of Mercy, and I think it's best appreciated without food - just the tea. It's a perfect tea for sitting outside and watching the sun come up. It gives me the inner calm to go back indoors and deal with the unsubmissive knitting...

I have multiple lengths of circulars in each size, so instead of putting a project on holding yarn, I knit a row and use up my various circular over the length of the project (e.g., for a sweater, I'll usually put the sleeve sts on one, the back on another, the front on 1--or 2 if a cardi. That way I can just continue on the next row after I see how it fits (without having to pick up sts).

I also try out sts (or edgings in this case) on small sections, sometimes using different needles like above, or if I'm only doing, say a dozen rows, I just work those few sts back and forth right on my needles. A lot easier than realizing after you've done a few l-o-o-ong rows and realize you don't like it.

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About Me

is the brains and brawn behind geoknittrix designs. Josh designs patterns and puts them up on Ravelry for all of you curious folks out there!
Josh is an avid knitter with a passion for Stephen West's designs and shawls! SHAWLSSS.....
He is currently living with the fact that his needles can only go as fast as he can physically move them - not as fast as his brain thinks the needles should be moving.
Josh also deals with the perils of working a retail job while balancing his college endeavors.
This is his story.
He also has begun to host a videocast and the vidcast can be seen at www.swordofaknitter.com